Maya create a cave-like object

[20719085]

Dear All,

First of all let me thank all of you who spend time here helping everyone out! 

I have this 3D object as shown below (thanks to helps from Brent from another post; and because this is a new question so I'm opening it here now):

What I would like to do is to cut away the marked sides to form a cave-like form:

- the upper "mountain" parts could be in a form of a "shell" and dig out the internal space as a "offset" of the "mountain"

or 

- to create a organic opening that's only cut into the sides partially and doesn't dig out all the internal space

I'd like to achieve both as they could be two options for work.

Again thank you very much in advance every one!!

Cheers,

Ryan

[brentmc]

Hi,

One way to make an opening is to select the faces where you want the opening and then extrude those inwards (possibly several times) to form a cave-like opening.

--

Brent

[20719085]

Hi Brent,

Thanks for the reply.

I have a thought on this:

I could scale down the form and then select those faces and extrude them out, and then boolean it with the original ones to cut open the side. 

With changing the pivot down to the base I should get some decent result.

[20719085]

Hi Brent,

My previously mentioned method worked in particular case but not in general.

I've attached this file and would it be possible for you to please have a look at it?

Also noted that when I smooth the upper form the diagonal edges became rounded as well. Is there a way to keep them sharp and smooth everything else?

Cheers!

[Anonymous]

I've done this before by putting a pane as the ground then two cubes on top of it with a narrow gap in the middle, with this I exported the obj's and within five minutes painted them with the noise brush into deformed shapes which perfectly mimicked how it looks when you are going through a cave.

I use Maya to create a basic obj shape then zbrush to create corruption's on the model it improves the look every time and only ever takes me a few minutes but in Maya say the process of creating a rock is either going to be automated so you have to work with what shape you're given or you're going to spend hours shaping something which could have looked better with a really fast;

Maya create cube & scale to preference
> obj export
> z brush import
> select brush preset
> change strength and brush size
> subdivide if there isn't many vertexes already put on your cube in Maya
> brush cube some parts more than other as caves are eroded so the passage should get narrower or wider as you go through
> brush again with smooth brush if you desire
> export obj from z brush
> delete cube and import obj to Maya (will be in the exact position your cube was)

I should probably also note that if your computer struggles with high poly renders in maya zbrush has controls to reverse subdivide to reduce the polygon count if you don't do it too strong it will keep the majority of its shape

It saves so so much time
And what's best if you don't want to learn to use z brush I'm sure this exact technique is possible in Maya, I'm just self taught and unaware of how to brush meshes in Maya as I first got into brushing my models with inspiration from a zbrush tutorial and ironically my first time going in zbrush without any guidance I created a cave

[brentmc]

Hi,

There are several methods to only smooth parts of your mesh.

If you are using Mesh > Smooth then you can just select the faces that you want to smooth.

Alternatively, you can select the edges that you want to keep sharp and use Mesh Tools > Crease to make those edges sharp. Then if you smooth the mesh (using either Mesh > Smooth or Smooth Mesh Preview) those edges will not be smoothed.

--

Brent